That's it: no more moping and feeling sorry for myself; I'm chalking up my bad week to character-builiding and claiming the match. I tried very hard to prove that dialysis is overwhelming and I am mentally unbalanced as a result, but unfortunately this has been established not to be the case - my psychiatrist told me so.
As a result of an unfortunate situation at the start of this week (I KNEW sleeping with my housemate was going to come back and bite me in the ass) I flipped out a little bit and, ever the pragmatist, concluded that I was going to need a little bit of help. On Tuesday afternoon, I had a tearful session with my new favourite psychologist, the lovely Beth. At this point, I was at my nadir and Beth felt it would be helpful for me to at least form a connection with a resident psychiatrist so that an extra layer of help would be available in the face of any future freaking out. As the week progressed, the situation with My Housemate eased somewhat and I began feeling calmer and increasingly positive, but the appointment with the psychiatrist was set and it seemed like a good to idea to go ahead with it all the same.
I had happily agreed for the good doctor to come and visit me whilst I was dialysing on the unit, but in retrospect, I should have insisted on somewhere a bit more private. An hour or so into my Friday session, he arrived and introduced himself, pulled up a chair and pulled the two flimsy curtains on either side of my chair across to form an open-fronted cubicle. Though the curtains may occlude you from sight, sound-proof they are not.
His questions started off innocuously enough though I was un-nerved by the fact he seemed to be texting his way through our chat. Fuck sake, I thought irritably as I took him through the finer details of the previous few days, you can't wait until we're done to check your Facebook? He must have picked up on my irate vibe because he quickly explained he was in fact taking notes on his phone because he "looses bits of paper so easily". Though it was a relief to find out he was not sexting his wife, the thought of my intimate mental peculiarities being input into his phone was somewhat unsettling; one accidental button push and my neuroses about my illness and odd phobia of tea would land in the inbox of his entire phone book. What with his absent minded paper-losing ways, I was wondering whether I should ask to see some credentials.
As our "session" progressed his questions began to get a little intense. We began to discuss a situation I had found myself in a few years back that I have only ever talked about with my family and VERY close friends and unsurprisingly, I was unwilling to share them with the details with the entirety of my dialysis unit. Fortunately, this was one occasion for which I was thankful that my fellow dialysers are, on the whole, geriatric, deaf and / or asleep. Still: doctor / patient confidentiality my arse.
He was incredibly matter of fact in the way he asked some fairly deep and difficult questions and threw in some vignettes about his own life for good measure ("oh my wife is a teacher, it is a very stressful job"...helpful, cheers for that...) He was not so much performing a compassionate psychological analysis as a cross-examination. However, it was not his job to be soft and kind and cuddly; Dr Blunt here's job was to work out whether I was planning to throw myself in front of a tube within the next few days (I wasn't, as it turns out). I came to quite like his assertive nature: no amount of suicidal anecdotes fazed him and even my admission that I totally fore-go any notion of a fluid restriction for Saturday night's out barely saw him barely raise an eyebrow. By this point, he had stopped playing Mindsweeper on his phone and was leant back causally in his chair chatting a questioning away. "Do you feel guilty?" he asked at one point. "For what?" I asked, slightly baffled. "Just a wild card," he shrugged, "just thought I'd throw it out there and see if it brought anything up?" By this point, I'm pretty sure he was just getting bored.
"Well," he concluded, once everyone in my unit had been sure to understand that My Housemate had dicked me over and I had never quite got over my parents' divorce, "you seem very well adjusted and I don't think we need to carry on seeing you." Great. This keeps happening: every time I feel like I am in psychological meltdown and need to see any sort of shrink, they always give me the same diagnosis: that I am completely sound of mind, grounded and seem to be emotionally shrewd and exceptionally able to understand and deal with emotional stresses. The last time I had a session with my pre-Beth counsellor, David, I finished all his sentences and his last question was whether I had ever studied psychology. Whilst obviously this is a positive and useful trait, sometimes I wish they would just tell me I'm a little bit crazy. After all, I've been dealing with some pretty intense shit for the last couple of years - is it really too much to ask that I be a bit dark and tortured as a result? Instead of being told how well I'm coping all the time, I suppose it would be just be reassuring to know that other people can appreciate it can be very, very hard and that sometimes it feels like I can't cope, although, I suppose, I am, really.
On the back of my time with Dr. Blunt I have come to my own conclusion: living with this disease is tough and sometimes I find it really tough. That's it. I'm going to stop flagellating myself for finding it hard-going and appreciate the fact I'm probably stronger than I give myself credit for. When extraneous everyday things are going badly, it is all too easy to play the but-I-have-kidney-failure-I-just-don't-need-this-right-now card. That particular card comes in handy for a lot of things - namely getting out of social events I can't be arsed to go to - but as cosmic insulation from falling shit it is useless. Yeah, this disease is crappy, and dull, and frustrating and even debilitating, but with a shrug of my shoulders of which Dr Blunt would be proud, I ask you: whatcha gonna do?
As a result of an unfortunate situation at the start of this week (I KNEW sleeping with my housemate was going to come back and bite me in the ass) I flipped out a little bit and, ever the pragmatist, concluded that I was going to need a little bit of help. On Tuesday afternoon, I had a tearful session with my new favourite psychologist, the lovely Beth. At this point, I was at my nadir and Beth felt it would be helpful for me to at least form a connection with a resident psychiatrist so that an extra layer of help would be available in the face of any future freaking out. As the week progressed, the situation with My Housemate eased somewhat and I began feeling calmer and increasingly positive, but the appointment with the psychiatrist was set and it seemed like a good to idea to go ahead with it all the same.
I had happily agreed for the good doctor to come and visit me whilst I was dialysing on the unit, but in retrospect, I should have insisted on somewhere a bit more private. An hour or so into my Friday session, he arrived and introduced himself, pulled up a chair and pulled the two flimsy curtains on either side of my chair across to form an open-fronted cubicle. Though the curtains may occlude you from sight, sound-proof they are not.
His questions started off innocuously enough though I was un-nerved by the fact he seemed to be texting his way through our chat. Fuck sake, I thought irritably as I took him through the finer details of the previous few days, you can't wait until we're done to check your Facebook? He must have picked up on my irate vibe because he quickly explained he was in fact taking notes on his phone because he "looses bits of paper so easily". Though it was a relief to find out he was not sexting his wife, the thought of my intimate mental peculiarities being input into his phone was somewhat unsettling; one accidental button push and my neuroses about my illness and odd phobia of tea would land in the inbox of his entire phone book. What with his absent minded paper-losing ways, I was wondering whether I should ask to see some credentials.
As our "session" progressed his questions began to get a little intense. We began to discuss a situation I had found myself in a few years back that I have only ever talked about with my family and VERY close friends and unsurprisingly, I was unwilling to share them with the details with the entirety of my dialysis unit. Fortunately, this was one occasion for which I was thankful that my fellow dialysers are, on the whole, geriatric, deaf and / or asleep. Still: doctor / patient confidentiality my arse.
He was incredibly matter of fact in the way he asked some fairly deep and difficult questions and threw in some vignettes about his own life for good measure ("oh my wife is a teacher, it is a very stressful job"...helpful, cheers for that...) He was not so much performing a compassionate psychological analysis as a cross-examination. However, it was not his job to be soft and kind and cuddly; Dr Blunt here's job was to work out whether I was planning to throw myself in front of a tube within the next few days (I wasn't, as it turns out). I came to quite like his assertive nature: no amount of suicidal anecdotes fazed him and even my admission that I totally fore-go any notion of a fluid restriction for Saturday night's out barely saw him barely raise an eyebrow. By this point, he had stopped playing Mindsweeper on his phone and was leant back causally in his chair chatting a questioning away. "Do you feel guilty?" he asked at one point. "For what?" I asked, slightly baffled. "Just a wild card," he shrugged, "just thought I'd throw it out there and see if it brought anything up?" By this point, I'm pretty sure he was just getting bored.
"Well," he concluded, once everyone in my unit had been sure to understand that My Housemate had dicked me over and I had never quite got over my parents' divorce, "you seem very well adjusted and I don't think we need to carry on seeing you." Great. This keeps happening: every time I feel like I am in psychological meltdown and need to see any sort of shrink, they always give me the same diagnosis: that I am completely sound of mind, grounded and seem to be emotionally shrewd and exceptionally able to understand and deal with emotional stresses. The last time I had a session with my pre-Beth counsellor, David, I finished all his sentences and his last question was whether I had ever studied psychology. Whilst obviously this is a positive and useful trait, sometimes I wish they would just tell me I'm a little bit crazy. After all, I've been dealing with some pretty intense shit for the last couple of years - is it really too much to ask that I be a bit dark and tortured as a result? Instead of being told how well I'm coping all the time, I suppose it would be just be reassuring to know that other people can appreciate it can be very, very hard and that sometimes it feels like I can't cope, although, I suppose, I am, really.
On the back of my time with Dr. Blunt I have come to my own conclusion: living with this disease is tough and sometimes I find it really tough. That's it. I'm going to stop flagellating myself for finding it hard-going and appreciate the fact I'm probably stronger than I give myself credit for. When extraneous everyday things are going badly, it is all too easy to play the but-I-have-kidney-failure-I-just-don't-need-this-right-now card. That particular card comes in handy for a lot of things - namely getting out of social events I can't be arsed to go to - but as cosmic insulation from falling shit it is useless. Yeah, this disease is crappy, and dull, and frustrating and even debilitating, but with a shrug of my shoulders of which Dr Blunt would be proud, I ask you: whatcha gonna do?
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